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Kate Driscoll Derickson, Lorraine Dowler, and Nicole Laliberte

Geography and international studies are both deeply rooted in masculinist, imperialist, and patriarchal ways of viewing the world. However, over the past 20 years, the increase in the ...
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Geography and international studies are both deeply rooted in masculinist, imperialist, and patriarchal ways of viewing the world. However, over the past 20 years, the increase in the number of women within these fields has planted the seeds for the introduction of feminist intervention. Feminist geography is primarily concerned with the real experiences of individuals and groups in their own localities. It can be viewed as the study of "situated knowledges derived from the lives and experiences of women in different social and geographic locations." Feminist geographers consistently seek out techniques which are in line with their feminist philosophies. Although much of the work will be categorized as qualitative, such as ethnographic fieldwork, feminist geographers recognize the need for feminist approaches in quantitative analysis, and techniques alone do not render the project feminist. Rather, feminists in geography argue that all types of data collection must recognize the power relationship between the researcher and the researched. Feminist geography also operates at the local scale and crosses to the global. This is illustrated by geographers who not only study the daily lives of women in a refugee camp but also construct theoretical arguments focused on global forces such as climate change or war in relation to the international migration of women.

John James Quinn

Studies on African foreign policies and policymaking have received much less attention compared to other aspects of African studies. Most foreign policy-related studies have been in-depth ...
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Studies on African foreign policies and policymaking have received much less attention compared to other aspects of African studies. Most foreign policy-related studies have been in-depth case studies illustrating how foreign policy decisions were limited, shaped, and constrained by international, regional, and domestic constraints. Forms of these studies include single case studies, a collection of single case studies within an edited volume, a comparative study of few regional countries, a study of a subregion, and discussions of the whole region of Africa. The region has some of the smallest and weakest states in the world. As such, African foreign policy analysis is often consistent with earlier analyses of small state foreign policy literature. The primary foreign policy behavior of small states are the following: (a) low levels of overall participation in world affairs; (b) high levels of activity in intergovernmental organizations; (c) high levels of support for international legal norms; (d) avoidance to the use of force as a technique of statecraft; (e) avoidance of behaviour and policies which tend to alienate the more powerful states in the system; (f) a narrow functional and geographic range of concern in foreign policy activities; (g) frequent utilization of moral and normative positions on international issues. Most of these views are reflected in studies of African foreign policies.

Elizabeth C. Hanson

International communication (also referred to as global communication or transnational communication) is the communication practice that occurs across international borders. As a field of ...
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International communication (also referred to as global communication or transnational communication) is the communication practice that occurs across international borders. As a field of study, international communication is a branch of communication studies, concerned with the scope of “government-to-government,” “business-to-business,” and “people-to-people” interactions at a global level. Apart from journalism, international communication also occurs in other areas and the nature of the “information” that is circulated can be classified in a wide variety of categories, such as cultural, scientific, and intelligence. Efficient communication networks had played crucial roles in establishing ancient imperial authority and international trade. The extent of empire could be used as an indication of the efficiency of communication. Ancient empires such as Rome, Persia, and China all utilized writing in collecting information and creating enormous postal and dispatch systems. By the fifteenth-century, news had been disseminated trans-nationally in Europe. During the post-Cold War era, the intense relations of super powers halted with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the emergence of the Third World countries meant that the unequally developed communication order can no longer exist. But the moment international communications stepped into the information age, the convergence of telecommunication and computing and the ability to move all types of data—pictures, words, sounds—via the Internet have revolutionized international information exchange.

Karl P. Mueller

Air power refers to the use of aviation by nations and other political actors in the pursuit of power and security interests, along with the use of long-range missiles. Since armies and ...
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Air power refers to the use of aviation by nations and other political actors in the pursuit of power and security interests, along with the use of long-range missiles. Since armies and navies first began to experiment with the use of airplanes as implements of war, air power has emerged as an integral component of modern warfare. Air power was born in the crucible of World War I, but came of age in the conflagration of World War II. The developmental history of air power is significant to security studies in general and to the study of air power in particular. Owing to the rapid series of state changes in air power, trying to understand the nature of air power and its effects on modern warfare and international security has become more complicated. Two questions that are central to the study of international security are whether air power facilitates offense as a whole and whether it encourages aggression as a result. There has also been a debate over the issue of how air power can most effectively be used to coerce an enemy through strategic bombing. Another source of disagreement is the question of whether air and space power constitute one subject or two. In general, there are compelling merits in treating space power as a domain of national security theory and policy separate from those of land, sea, and air power.

Patricia A. Weitsman

Military alliances predate even the state system as a form of international cooperation, and they take on many forms. The motivations of states seeking to join, the commitment levels ...
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Military alliances predate even the state system as a form of international cooperation, and they take on many forms. The motivations of states seeking to join, the commitment levels formalized in the alliance agreement, and degrees of institutionalization all take different forms in the literature, but these scholarly perspectives can be boiled down to a few approaches: the realist, the rationalist and formalist, the liberal or institutionalist, and finally, the constructivist arguments on alliance identities. Moreover, a common thread among the literature on military alliances is an understanding that alliances provide a wide range of services to their members, and contain more than one motivation for forming and maintaining the alliances. Given that the motivations for forming alliances are varied, especially during different threat environments, it is important to ask what the consequences are. In this vein, scholars consider two primary issues: if these alliances can fulfill their intended missions, and if there are unintended consequences which may arise and lead to undesirable results. A related issue to the study of what motivates alliances is in how well they perform in terms of cohesion. Cohesion is, roughly speaking, the capacity of an alliance to effectively carry out its goals. Finally, there are the coalitions—ad hoc multinational understandings that are forged to undertake a specific mission, and dissolve once that mission is complete. They are not wholly analytically distinct from wartime alliances, although the latter may have a greater degree of institutionalization and may predate a specific wartime operation.

Silviya Lechner

The concept of anarchy is seen as the cardinal organizing category of the discipline of International Relations (IR), which differentiates it from cognate disciplines such as Political ...
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The concept of anarchy is seen as the cardinal organizing category of the discipline of International Relations (IR), which differentiates it from cognate disciplines such as Political Science or Political Philosophy. This article provides an analytical review of the scholarly literature on anarchy in IR, on two levels—conceptual and theoretical. First, it distinguishes three senses of the concept of anarchy: (1) lack of a common superior in an interaction domain; (2) chaos or disorder; and (3) horizontal relation between nominally equal entities, sovereign states. The first and the third senses of “anarchy”’ are central to IR. Second, it considers three broad families of IR theory where anarchy figures as a focal assumption—(1) realism and neorealism, (2) English School theory (international society approach), and (3) Kant’s republican peace. Despite normative and conceptual differences otherwise, all three bodies of theory are ultimately based on Hobbes’s argument for a “state of nature.” The article concludes with a summary of the key challenges to the discourse of international anarchy posed by the methodology of economics and economics-based theories that favor the alternative discourse of global hierarchy.

Claudia Aradau

Sovereignty has been variously understood as the given principle of international relations, an institution, a social construct, a performative discourse subject to historical ...
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Sovereignty has been variously understood as the given principle of international relations, an institution, a social construct, a performative discourse subject to historical transformation, or a particular practice of power. The “articulations” of sovereignty refer to sovereignty as a practice that is worked on and in turn works with and against other practices. Alongside territory and supreme authority, sovereignty is characterized by the capacity to make and enforce laws. Sovereignty has also been defined in opposition to rights, as the spatiotemporal limits it instantiates are also the limits of rights. Another conceptualization of sovereignty has been revived in international relations, partly in response to the question of exclusions and limits that sovereign practices enacted. In addition, sovereignty is not inextricably tied up with the state but is articulated with heterogeneous and contradictory discourses and practices that create meaning about the international, and has consequences for the kind of community, politics, and agency that are possible. There are three effects of the logic of sovereignty in the international system: the ordering of the domestic and the international, the spatio-temporal limits to politics, and the exclusions from agency. In addition, there are three renditions of the international as a “thick” social space: those of globalization theories, of biopolitics, and of empire.

Barbara Baudot

Art can leave an impact on international politics by offering inspiration and perspective to relations between peoples of different nations and life experiences. It can furthermore ...
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Art can leave an impact on international politics by offering inspiration and perspective to relations between peoples of different nations and life experiences. It can furthermore “re-enchant” the world as humanity faces many critical challenges, such as threats to peace and security; widespread and massive violations of political, civil, social, and cultural rights; and the deterioration of the biosphere. The most direct and easily perceptible contribution of art to international relations is of an instrumental nature, where art is deliberately used to obtain certain objectives such as awakening a sense of patriotism, or stirring people’s emotions to take action against a perceived problem. Art also has an extrinsic value in international relations, where the knowledge, ideas, inspirations, and sympathies of international political relevance that can be derived from a work of art by the discerning reader, listener, or observer. It is differentiated from the instrumental value of art through the artist’s intent. A work of art is considered of instrumental value when it is meant to fulfill political objectives, while extrinsic works of art seek to convey the artist’s thoughts and feelings, regardless of political persuasion. Finally, there is the intrinsic value of art, which can be found in many artworks that have universal appeal. These pieces communicate feelings and ideas that are universally perceivable and enchant the sensitive observer, and can influence the affairs of nations by bringing into relief ennobled visions that draw together imagination, intuition, and objectivity.

Kay Gibson and Carolyn M. Shaw

With the shift in learning objectives that were more focused on the development of skills and processes, new assessment techniques were required to be developed to determine the ...
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With the shift in learning objectives that were more focused on the development of skills and processes, new assessment techniques were required to be developed to determine the effectiveness of new active-learning techniques for teaching these skills. In order for assessment to be done well, instructors must consider what learning objective they are assessing, clarify why they are assessing and what benefits will derive from the process, consider whether they will conduct assessments during or after the learning process, and specifically address how they will design solid assessments of active learning best suited to their needs. The various types of assessment for active-learning strategies include written and oral debriefing, observations, peer- and self-assessment, and presentations and demonstrations. In addition, there are several different measurement tools for recording the assessment data, including checklists and student surveys. A final aspect to consider when examining assessment techniques and measurement tools is the construction of an effective rubric. Ultimately, further research is warranted in the learning that occurs through the use of active-learning techniques in contrast with traditional teaching methods, the “portability” of active-learning exercises across cultures, and the use of newer media—such as internet and video content—as it is increasingly incorporated into the classroom.

Inanna Hamati-Ataya

Behavioralism is an approach in political science that became predominant in American social sciences from the 1950s until well into the 1970s. The Behavioral Revolution in American ...
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Behavioralism is an approach in political science that became predominant in American social sciences from the 1950s until well into the 1970s. The Behavioral Revolution in American political science began as a “protest” against “traditional” political science, which it views as being both too descriptive and too speculative, lacking rigor and ambition, and incapable of analytical theorization and therefore of cognitive growth. Behavioralism opened up the discipline to various theories and methods imported from the social and pure sciences. Behavioralists replaced political philosophy with the philosophy of science, thereby setting new standards for the formulation of concepts, hypotheses, theories, and protocols for empirical testing. Behavioralism thus represents a sharp break from the previous discipline. Two “great” debates mark behavioralism as a paradigm: the first was between “realism” and “idealism” over the what-question concerning the discipline’s subject matter, while the second was about “methodology” and the how-question. Recently, some scholars have called for a revival of behavioral international relations (IR) as a subfield concerned with the explanation of the behavior of leaders, rather than states —an approach that refocuses behavioralism on the individual as a unit of analysis and on the underlying processes that account for political judgment and decisions. Whether such a research program can reclaim behavioralism’s place among the leading paradigms of IR, or whether the discipline is ready to welcome such a revival, is unclear.

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